Paper 028: Sky High: Building a Corpus of English for Flight Training

Schneider, Andrew (Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, United States); Rachelle Udell (Georgia State University, United States); Eric Friginal (Georgia State University, United States)

Keywords: Aviation English, English for Specific Purposes, ESP, Corpus development, flight training, policy

Abstract

Corpus research in the field of Aviation English has largely focused on communication between professional pilots and air traffic controllers (see Bieswanger, 2016; Borowska, 2017). However, there has yet to be a thorough corpus analysis of discourse between student pilots and their flight instructors. Furthermore, it is currently unknown to what extent the high-stress, high-stakes environment of in-air flight training influences multilingual student pilots’ L2 development or if factors such as stress and time pressure impact learners’ ability to successfully communicate in this specialized register of English with both familiar and unfamiliar interlocutors. Guided by Biber and Conrad’s (2009) framework, a situational analysis of flight training discourse was conducted at a prominent aviation school in the United States. This analysis revealed that flight training operations involve oral, simulated flight, and in-air flight activities featuring a diverse range of communicative interactions between student pilots, instructors, school support staff, and local air traffic control. The resulting Corpus of Flight Training (CFT) is the only representative corpus of authentic discourse used in flight training to date. It is comprised of audio and video recordings of one-on-one, instructional communication between ESL student pilots from a variety of L1 backgrounds paired with both mono- and multilingual English-speaking flight instructors. The CFT currently guides the development of pre-training assessments and language support programs for accepted students (classroom instruction, one-on-one tutoring, etc.) and will potentially inform macro language policy decisions for all FAA-certified flight training programs in the United States. The unique nature of this context has presented an equally distinctive set of challenges in the development of the CFT. Nevertheless, collecting corpus data in high-stress environments is both important and beneficial. This presentation explores these challenges and benefits and details the necessary foundations of policy and procedure needed for data collection in high-stakes occupational training scenarios.

References:

Biber, D., & Conrad, S. (2009). Register, genre, and style. Cambridge University Press.
Bieswanger, M. (2016). Aviation English: Two distinct specialised registers?. Variational Text Linguistics Revisiting Register in English, De Gruyter, 67-86. Borowska, A. (2017). Avialinguistics: The study of language for aviation purposes. Peter Lang GmbH

Presentation video

Supplementary Information

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Q&A live (Zoom) session

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